When I was fifteen, my grandfather David surprised me with a strange request. He wanted me to teach him to read English. Grandpa came to Israel from Morocco, and he worked for forty years as a carpenter in Be'er Sheva. He speaks Hebrew, Arabic and French, but he never had the chance to learn English at school.
At first I thought he was joking. 'Why now, Grandpa?' I asked. He explained that my aunt and her family had moved to Canada, and his grandchildren there were growing up speaking mostly English. 'They write to me, and I can't read their letters,' he said quietly. 'I don't want to need someone to translate my own family for me.'
We started the next week. Every Tuesday after school, I sat with him at his kitchen table. I was nervous because I had never taught anyone anything. My first plan was to use my old school textbook, but it was full of exercises about shopping malls and pop music, and Grandpa looked bored. So I changed my method. Instead of the textbook, we read the short messages his grandchildren sent, word by word.
It was not easy. Some weeks he forgot words we had practiced many times, and once he closed the notebook and said he was too old for this. I told him that I also forget words, and that mistakes are part of learning. The next Tuesday he was waiting for me at the door.
After six months, Grandpa read a whole letter from my cousin Daniel without my help. He laughed at a joke in it before I even understood it myself. Then he picked up a pen and wrote his first reply in English: three short sentences, with one spelling mistake.
Teaching him changed me too. I learned to be patient, and I discovered that a teacher sometimes learns more than the student.